Klahr,
Fay, and
Dunbar ( 1993) summarize their research in the following
account.

Scientific discovery involves search in a space of hypotheses and a space of
experiments. We describe an investigation of developmental differences in the
search constraint heuristics used in scientific reasoning. Sixty-four subjects
(technically trained college students, community college students with little technical training, sixth graders, and third graders) were taught how to use a programmable robot. Then they were presented with a new operation, provided
with a hypothesis about how it might work, and asked to conduct experiments
to discover how it really did work. The suggested hypothesis was always incorrect, as subjects could discover if they wrote informative experiments, and it
was either plausible or implausible. The rule for how the unknown operation
actually worked was either very similar or very dissimilar to the given hypothesis. Children focused primarily on plausible hypotheses, conducted a limited
set of experiments, designed experiments that were difficult to interpret, and
were unable to induce implausible (but correct) hypotheses from data. Adults
were much better than children in discovering implausible rules. The performance deficits we found were not simply the result of children's inadequate encoding or mnemonic skills. Instead, the adults appear to use domain-general
skills that go beyond the logic of confirmation and disconfirmation and deal

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